On the opening night of West Side Story in 1957, US supreme court justice Felix Frankfurter collared the composer Leonard Bernstein. "The history of America is now changed," he told him, weeping with emotion. And if Frankfurter's reaction was exaggerated, Jerome Robbins's gangland take on Romeo and Juliet certainly changed the history of musical theatre. The famous opening scene, with the Polish-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks prowling the parched New York cityscape, has been endlessly copied but never equalled.

No matter how many times you watch it, Robbins's choreography hooks you. The finger snaps lay down the challenge; the nervy, low-slung glissades and skittering step-ball-changes confirm the sense of danger. And then that edgy, anxious clarinet ushers in the big theme and Bernardo and his lieutenants swing into those iconic side-kicks, chests forward and arms thrust skywards in a fatalistic statement of the street fighter's code of honour.

To say, in the era of The Wire and American Gangster, that the show has lost its punch is to miss the point. West Side Story was always operatic, always more about posturing than fighting, always shot through with a broad homoerotic streak. And the sentimental heart enclosed by all that strutting machismo was always pure blancmange. Accepted on these terms, the current production, directed by ex-dancer Joey McNeely (who worked with Robbins), is a joy.

The piece has always had a structural problem in that because neither of the two leads actually dances, they are distanced from a narrative driven in large part by choreography. As Tony, Anthony Festa lacks the stage presence of Pepe Muñoz's brooding Bernardo or Luke Hawkins's taut-wired Action, but he is a fine, confident singer. Jessica Soza, by the same token, pales as a character beside Penelope Armstead-Williams's sensual, suggestive Anita, but lights up when called upon to deploy her rippling soprano voice. Together, they're happily convincing and suitably naive as the young lovers.

The production numbers are admirably sharp-edged. Armstead-Williams and her Shark homegirls, at once sultry and wide-eyed, really come into their own in the show-stopping America, and the Jets dispatch Gee, Officer Krupke with lethally precise comic timing. We're never allowed to forget that this is a story of hatred and murder. "You make this world lousy!" Doug Rees's Doc bellows at the Jets after they've gang-raped Anita. "That's the way we found it!" sneers Hawkins's Action. The work's weakest sequence is the Somewhere ballet, intended to express Tony and Maria's dream of a utopia far from the desolation and racial vendettas of the West Side slums. Choreographically and dramatically mawkish, this ends with a descent into outright kitsch as the Sharks and Jets run on stage in virginal white and simper coyly at each other.

It's a hiccup in an otherwise formidably impressive evening. Voices are miked, which may suit some audience members more than others but unquestionably lends authority to the singers, and Bernstein's music is given a well-paced outing under the baton of Donald Chan. The show runs to 22 September. Catch it if you can.